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What’s All This, Then?

Link En Fuego is a repository of arbitrarily random (and often useful) links that I found on my many web forays. The subject can range from Dada to dabberlocks, Dacron to ducksauceology.

I opened it because I believe that “it [is] worth pursuing every disparate field [of knowledge] precisely because the fields were not disparate, but branches of knowledge intimately connected to one another…”

When: Friday, May 2, 2008 at 6:00 pm to Sunday, May 4, 2008 at about 3:00 pm, not including the impromptu after-party at Green Dragon Bistro & Brewpub and 5 minutes of suicide drink-making act involving the full accoutrements of CubeSpace’s soda machine and syrup bar—“so,” one of the mixer said “you can confidently answer your friends when they asked ‘when did you have your last suicide?’ with ‘in 2008! What about you?’”

Personally, BarCamp Portland was one of the best events that I have attended in Portland. The atmosphere was both very collaborative and conductive to ideas. The people, extremely smart. And the most important thing of all was that, to me, it seems that participants were there because they wanted to be there, not because they had to. To the attendees, technology may or may not be their day job (in fact, there was a good number of creative and ethnographer types attending as web/graphic designers and market/user researchers, respectively) but it is their passion. And I believe that getting together with people who share the same passion is very important.

When you clearly see that every participant have brilliant ideas just waiting for the right kind of community to adopt and execute them, you simply can’t help but get excited.

BONUS: I see this atmosphere lacking in the creative/advertising community meetups, and would love to organize one. Tweet or email me if you would like to collaborate. Also, if you’re the talented designer in a Titanium Powerbook that came up with the Word Processor app working model that I totally dig (it was based on logical flows of the writing process instead of, uh, a blank sheet of paper,) but for some reason forgot to give me your business card, I would love to hear more about that.

Technicality: ☝ ☝ ½Translation: Some sessions are technical, some are not (others are uniquely Portland.) Best of all, you get to pick and choose.